Recently I left goAgile together with two colleagues and friends (Martin Vinther and Brian Søgaard) to start a new Agile consultancy company. Shortly after we announced our decision to start on our own, two more colleagues (Kristian Haugaard and Per Beining), who have some of the same ideas about what direction we should take, decided to join us.

The decision wasn’t easy and people have asked why we would leave such a great company. I can’t disagree – goAgile was probably the second-best company in the world, but the answer is actually pretty straightforward – we left to build the best home for Agile minded consultants and clients in the world.

At Ugilic our main area of expertise and interest is still Agile transformations and Agile leadership. The five of us has considerable experience in helping medium to large-sized Danish companies transform from traditional development practices and waterfall project management, to adopt a more Agile mindset. We are helping companies get more productive, by increasing employee engagement and organizational agility and transparency.

The focus on Agile leadership and transformation is very similar to the work we were doing at goAgile. What’s different is, that we will bring on new people, who can help our clients also improve their technical skills and practices to support the Agile transformation. We believe that to get the full benefits of an Agile transformation and to make Agile stick, it’s also essential to focus on stuff like being able to automate test and deployment to shorten time to production, to write code that supports increased business agility, to focus on the smallest possible thing that could work (Minimal Viable Product) and value user feedback, even if it means throwing away code you just wrote. To learn more about my view on Agile Software Development, please read All I want for Christmas is you.

Internally we are also rethinking how we run the company. We want to build the new company on the same principles we teach our clients. Everything about the running of the company will be completely transparent to everyone involved and we will treat every consultant equally from the day they step in the door. We are doing this to increase engagement and accountability and because we believe some of the people joining us will probably have better ideas about what direction to take than we have. One of our main sources of inspiration is the Unboss movement, which also in part inspired us to name the company Ugilic (Unbossed Agile Consultants).

Things are still very new, but luckily both current and potential clients are excited about the direction we are taking. We have also been in contact with people, with the technical skills we are looking for, who are interested in joining the company.

As soon as our website is up and running at www.ugilic.dk, we will post more about our services and how we are running the company. From time to time I will also post some of my personal reflection on the journey here. To make sure you stay up-to-date on Ugilic, please sign-up for our newsletter at www.ugilic.dk (currently only in Danish) or contact me directly at martin(a)ugilic.dk.